


Clarity of Vision

by finnimbrand



Series: Wanda in the City [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, POV Wanda Maximoff, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Telepathic Wanda Maximoff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-24
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-02-06 08:01:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 20,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12813153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finnimbrand/pseuds/finnimbrand
Summary: Vision, enforcing the Accords, suspects Wanda of perpetrating a major crime using her powers.  A bet ensues.





	1. Chapter 1

Tiny sparks of Wanda's mental activity were scattered around the store like tiny pinprick stars, a twinkle in the cereal aisle by the fruity o's, a gleam in the darkness behind the milk, an extra shimmer of red atop the red delicious apples. No one in the store noticed.

Wanda was the next best thing to invisible, standing in an aisle where no one wanted to go, reading the network of her awareness, the streams of mental activity and the sense of the physical location of everyone in the store.

When Wanda had started developing new mental techniques -- techniques that kept her safe in a city where she was a wanted criminal -- she'd been surprised to find that most people in the city were already inclined to overlook her, brush by her, never give her a second glance. No one really looked at the woman hurrying by on the sidewalk; why would they? There were millions of women hurrying by on the sidewalk.

And no one looked at the woman checking her phone by the endless varieties of greeting cards. It no longer surprised her just how easy it was, or just how much she could hide behind the screen of general indifference.

Now she just wondered why it had ever surprised her. It had always been hard to get attention. Back in Sokovia, when she and her brother had been part of protests there, they'd screamed and shouted a message that was important, and no one had listened.

In America, in this crowded city filled with everything under the sun, it took even more than that to get their jaded attention.

Wanda ducked her head so that the bill of her baseball cap conveniently hid her face from a shopper passing the end of her aisle, and then held herself very still as a sudden spike of recognition -- the most dangerous feeling -- glittered in a mind at the front of the store. 

Wanda wasn't inside anyone's mind, just receiving surface thoughts, but as recognition blossomed in multiple minds, she caught a fragment of a repeated thought: a familiar name. _Avengers._

Her breath caught. Her first impulse was to run -- being overlooked only worked if no one was looking -- but as her thoughts scurried ahead of her along the escape routes, she realized that no one was thinking about her. People were moving toward the front of the store, staring through the plate glass windows, up into the sky.

Wanda moved a few steps foward, until she could see what was going on too.

It was a bird, it was a helicopter, it was a flying man-shaped object with maroon skin and a grey pattern across the dome of his head instead of hair. A casual sweater and jeans couldn't hide who this was, but he wasn't trying. _He_ was a hero; even the fickle media still said so.

Wanda's gaze darted toward the gem, but it was quiescent. Vision touched down lightly on the pavement outside of the store, as if gravity was a thing he chose to allow to affect him, and when he looked through the glass, his gaze pinned Wanda despite the crowd.

He saw her.

She considered running, but only for one panicked second. He would chase, they'd probably have to fight, and accident happened in fights. Instead, Wanda held his gaze and then moved toward the back of the store, grabbing a pair of sunglasses off the stand as she went. She needed a higher level disguise; she'd have to make do.

The alley behind the grocery store was filled with dumpsters and delivery bays; Wanda jumped down from the ledge with the door and hid behind a ramp. For anyone else, she might have tried to look like she was just keeping out of the way, not hiding; with Vision, she knew he would regard them as the same thing.

Vision arrived with a small crowd in tow; they hung back at the mouth of the alley, but they had their phones up, excited chatter rising from them like steam. They were ordinary people have extraordinary days. None of them were here as backup for Vision. It wasn't a trap.

That didn't make this any easier. As soon as Vision was close enough to shout at, Wanda clenched her fists and turned away so that she wouldn't.

"Is something wrong, Wanda?" Vision asked in an extremely reasonable tone of voice. He stopped a few feet away, taking care not to block Wanda in. How thoughtful.

"Why are you doing this to me?" Wanda said. Her jaw was stiff and her words were clipped.

"What am I doing to you?" Vision said. "I haven't done anything."

"Even if I pound you down to the subway with all these people watching, it means I'm going to have to run again," Wanda said. "And I'm tired of running. Haven't you done enough? Haven't you had enough?"

"What are you doing here, Wanda?" The words were so quiet that for a moment Wanda thought Vision was sincere. Ready to make things right between them again, like it used to be. Talk about it and find a way. If anyone could, Vision could. She and Vision had shared the gift of honesty between them when they were Avengers, asking questions to figure things out between the two of them, the foreigner and the artificial intelligence.

But then she followed his gaze, and saw that he was looking at the cardboard box under the ramp, filled with all her favorite foods and topped with a bunch of bananas. She wondered if he knew about the broken alarm on the back door too. Wires were easy to cut with a little concentration. 

"I am surviving," Wanda said. Residual honesty made her add, "It's important to me, surviving and being free. What are you doing here, Vision?"

"I am enforcing the Accords," Vision said.

The crowd was getting denser, but they still hadn't advanced very far down the alley. They didn't know what Vision was doing here, and no one was stupid enough to risk being the first to get in the way. Wanda sent exploratory sparks of her awareness through the door across the way, just in case she needed another escape route. This didn't have to be meant as a trap to be a trap. Honesty was one side of Vision's modus operandi, but the other side was plausibile deniability. She'd never learned to tell which was which.

"That is stupid of you," Wanda said flatly. "Don't you remember what happen the last time you tried to stop me?"

Vision shifted. The AI usually had a mimimum of body language; Wanda brought her hands up to block any move that he might try to make against her, but then realized that what she'd seen was a rare moment of uncertainty. She hesitated, her power thrumming beneath her skin. She kept it there, still concealed.

"I wonder if I should have wished to see you as other people see you, instead of the other way around. Perhaps then my vision would have been clearer," Vision said.

Wanda winced, the blow hitting home. The last bit of honest conversation they'd shared, turned against her. 

"Perhaps then I would have predicted how far you'd be willing to go, in defiance of all that is right."

That was going too far. "And then what?" Wanda laughed bitterly. "What would you have done with this prediction? With your amazing clarity of vision? How _dare_ you act like that's what's at stake here. This is my life, and my right to live it."

"You chose to act outside the law, and you must face the consequences. There must be consequences, that's what holds society together."

Everything in her screamed. Consequences. Punishment. Straight jackets and bars. Wanda put her back to the wall and let her power tickle the gem, just enough to send a shimmer through the air like a shockwave. There were gasps from the end of the alley; the crowd had advanced a half dozen feet, but that didn't matter any more. Only Vision mattered. "What choice have I ever had?" Wanda said. "Were there any consequences when my parents died? And yet I set aside my revenge to be an Avenger instead, but--"

"We tried to protect you," Vision said. He was better prepared to fight her this time; he took a step forward and nothing Wanda could do stopped him. Wanda frowned in concentration.

"I don't want protection that locks me up. I want to be left alone and allowed to live." 

"Then you shouldn't have broken the Accords in a way that can't be ignored." The words were paired with an attempt on Wanda's mental protections. 

Wanda laughed, knowing suddenly that she was going to win. Vision was like Clint Barton fighting Natasha Romanoff. His heart wasn't in it. And her heart was beating the tattoo of freedom; she had everything to fight for. "You can't ignore a few groceries? It's Stark's store, he can eat the loss," Wanda said.

"I am referring to the stock market manipulation. That is something that cannot be ignored."

Wanda pressed forward. "What stock market manipulation? I have no idea what you're talking about."

Vision backed up, more than he had to. "Are you claiming to be innocent?"

"Yes," Wanda said. She decided that he was trying to draw her out, and stayed where she was. "The stock market? Me?"

The gem in Vision's forehead flashed, and then dulled. Wanda waited for the attack, but it didn't come. Instead, Vision said, heavily, "It did not seem likely, and yet, many unlikely things have happened, and I have been wrong before."

Wanda waited, her heart still beating the beat of rebellion. Was he trying to blame her for his own miscalculation?

"Would you agree to a truce?"

"After all this? Are you joking?"

"No one has seen you, Wanda. Everything that has happened can be explained as me, and the gem. And if you are innocent..." Vision held out his hands. "I agree to whatever terms you want. We need to talk about this."

And once again, Wanda couldn't see that she had any choice.


	2. Chapter 2

A car picked them up in the alley and took them through the city. Wanda stared out the darkened windows, relieved to be out of the public eye but bemused to be hiding in Tony Stark's rich person bubble. She never would have got into this car with Tony Stark, though. Vision...was different.

The car turned off of a busy street into another alley. This alley had fewer dumpsters and more shiny black paint on the ironwork; they glided to a stop in front of an unmarked door. In the same second, the door opened and a man in a tuxedo emerged to usher them in. They strolled down an elegant hallway -- it might be the back of the building, but it wasn't commonplace -- into a private room with a table for two. White linen tablecloth and crystal glasses. The silverware was probably made out of silver.

"We can talk privately here," Vision said, as if that was the only thing notable about this room.

Wanda slid into her seat with a tiny toss of her hair to show she wasn't cowed, and accepted a pristine menu that was heavy with the weight of distinction. She was certain that this restaurant was one of the premier restaurants in the city. Vision had arranged for it using the form of telepathy known as the internet ... or maybe he'd connected to the phone system somehow. Wanda didn't know exactly what Vision was capable of.

But that went both ways, she thought, spreading out her awareness so that she couldn't be ambushed. She brushed against the waitress's mind as she was leaving after filling the crystal glasses with water, and the disinterest she found there was professional quality.

"For someone who doesn't eat, you have a strange habit of feeding me," Wanda said, flipping through the menu. She was unsurprised to find Paprikash on one of the pages.

"I'm worried about you," Vision said. "Have you been eating enough? I know how much food matters..."

"Yes, it matters so much that I've been stealing it," Wanda said, to get it over with. "It's not like I can get a regular job, and sometimes that means..." She shrugged. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do, she'd known that ever since her parents died. It was engrained in her. "Even if I didn't have a paperwork problem, I'd have a problem with people recognizing me."

"Yes. This is what I feared would happen, Wanda. Why I didn't want you to leave."

The door opened to admit the waitress again. Vision steepled his fingers, and waited while Wanda ordered. Not Paprikash.

"The one thing I don't regret is leaving with Clint," Wanda said when they were alone again. "Even if it meant I had to defeat you first. You were holding me prisoner. Without a trial!" These things were supposed to matter in America. "Why not just put me to sleep until you can guarantee I'll be good, or put me in a straight jacket in the middle of the ocean so that you can pretend like I don't exist it all..."

She could see the fiery glow from her hands reflected in Vision's eyes, and closed her eyes briefly against the sight. She choked down on her powers, hard; she was no poltergeist, to throw things around because she was angry. Though it didn't help that Vision was so impassive, his eyes clear and curious, as if she were a specimen in some human experiment he was conducting. Woman, with powers, furious.

"I didn't think I'd have to pound you into the subbasement last time," Wanda said. Her smile showed all of her teeth. "But I'll do that again too if I have to."

"Duly noted," Vision said. She wished he was easier to read.

She swirled her water around in the crystal glass and tried to think of something innocuous to say. It used to be so easy to talk to Vision. No longer. They sat in silence until the food arrived, though Wanda almost caught Vision on the verge of saying something a couple of times, he backed down when she glared at him.

After the food arrived, Wanda decided that it was time to talk about what they were here for.

"This stock market problem. Why do you think it's me?" Wanda said. "Why would I be stealing dinner if I was making millions on the stock market? Do I look like I have millions?"

"Don't be angry, Wanda," Vision said. "You might get millions eventually, but you have to have money to make money. It's a exponential curve, but it starts off slowly."

Wanda nodded. "So someone is doing a lot of work for very little right now. And you want to find them before they work up to the big time?"

Vision hesitated. 

"You might as well tell me what is going on," Wanda said. "If I am doing it, I already know, and if I am not... then you owe me an explanation. And perhaps I will see something that you did not."

Vision looked like he knew the flaw in that argument -- maybe she could help, but more likely she just wanted to know how much he knew -- but must have decided that even then, she had a right to the evidence against her.

"We don't know exactly how it's being done," he said. "We detected the manipulation with statistical methods, and we've tracked down the accounts that were active in manipulating the price of the stocks, but none of these things led to real people. Corporations, owned by other corporations, and circular ownership. Everything on record was designed to be abandoned."

"Isn't that expensive?" Wanda said.

"Not really. You can do it online, or by mail."

Wanda laughed, sincerely amused. "America is so strange. And you think I could come up with this?"

Vision shifted. Perhaps he was uncomfortable. "Sokovia isn't immune from this sort of fraud," Vision said. "It's less regulated--"

"The people I know in Sokovia do not have the capital," Wanda said, sipping from a crystal glass and eying Vision. "And neither do I. Not even for mail order companies."

"You may have fallen in with ... confederates," Vision said. Wanda was sure of it now; he was uncomfortable with this conversation.

"Oh, now I have confederates," Wanda said. She thought she'd found a way under his skin, and she was going to use it. "Viz," she said, trying to invoke their old understanding. "I'm not doing anything that would be breaking the spirit of the Sokovia Accords."

Wanda felt a familiar pang as she said the final words: Sokovia, her country, the name of what was used to attack her, force her into hiding and make everything she did wrong. But Sokovia had never been an easy country: not to live in, nor to leave. That was...familiar pain, the cruelty of the country that was her home. Sokovia.

"I know you have rationalized what you are doing, but stealing--"

She held up a hand, and he stopped. She continued carefully, trying to make him understand. "It's not a rationalization that I can't get a regular job. I do what I can to make money, you probably wouldn't approve of that either, but there is no place in any society in the world for me, because of the Sokovia Accords." She rolled the words on her tongue, feeling the sweet pain.

"You could come back. It's not too late."

He didn't understand. "I'm not an Avenger any more, Vision, and the reason that I became an Avenger -- we've talked about this before. I thought I could make up for what I've done."

"And you still can!" Vision said eagerly. "You just--"

Wanda shook her head. "I'm not seeking redemption any more," she said. "I'm not trying to make restitution. I can't. Every time I try to ... change the world, to act on a global scale, things go wrong. It doesn't matter whether I try to hurt or to help, if my mistakes are magnified. I don't know enough, I'm just learning. So now..."

"You need to return to the team. That's how you can learn the most."

Wanda shook her head more forcefully. "Listen to me, Viz. I don't want to save the world. If you try to save the world from _everything_ , you're going to run into people who don't want saving, and they're going to be _right_. That's where the Avengers went wrong. Sometimes the world really does need...us--" That was hard to say. She didn't want to leave that opening, after everything that had happened, but if Ultron came back, or something on that scale, she might be needed. Or maybe someday they'd need her to fight aliens, to defend the entire Earth. She'd do that, but only if she had to.

"Sometimes the world _doesn't_ need avenging. That's why the Avengers lost...Bruce Banner. Thor. Isn't it? They lost trust in the mission."

"But now that we are acting under the sanction of the UN--"

Wanda sighed. "Do you really think that makes it more likely that you will do the right thing because you have a committee to tell you what to do? Steve's right, everyone has to decide what is right for themselves... I didn't really understand that, when I was an Avenger."

Vision was silent. Maybe he had started to listen. Was that too much to hope for?

"I thought as long as I followed Steve, everything would be right, because...he's the most right person I've ever known. And he believed in me. And I don't want to do evil, but I also don't want to do nothing."

"But now Steve..." She looked at Vision. He seemed fascinated. She hoped he wasn't taking notes because he wanted to track down Steve too, but she wouldn't give him any clues either way. "Steve had his own path to take, and I..."

She shrugged. "I can choose a smaller scale of action. That's what I want now. Under the radar. Little acts of kindness, not great acts of affecting the world."

"Tell me the truth. You're not using your powers?"

"Only for small things. I find people who want to be heard, and I listen to them. They want me to look at them," she said. "It makes them feel ... present. Important. They want their concerns to be important." She showed her teeth. "Sometimes I steal from Tony Stark, but I think that he owes me."

"He...would probably agree."

"He just wants to force me to take my payback in a specific way, his way."

"Well, yes. It is his way." Vision shook his head, as if to clear it. "But that doesn't answer the big question. The stock market manipulation--"

Wanda thudded her water glass down on the table. Vision might have been listening, but he hadn't understood a thing she'd been saying. "Don't you understand? The stock market is too big for me."

"And yet, someone in this city with powers like yours must have been involved. And when I looked in this city, and I found you. Is that a coincidence, Wanda?"

Wanda looked at him, trying to think of another way to make him understand. Nothing came to mind. She remembered the food on the plate in front of her. It was no longer steaming, but each mouthful was a burst of flavors like nothing she'd ever eaten before. She ate a few bites, thinking that it would be a shame if she had to leave before she finished. This food was too go to go to waste.

"I've eliminated every possible route for the information to be stolen by someone without powers," Vision said, as if Wanda cared.

"Some of the information that was used to time the trades on the stock market was secret information known only to a very few insiders at the companies involved. In several of the recent cases, I was able to control this information, so I know exactly what could have happened to it."

Wanda closed her eyes to savor the flavors of fish and creamy, spicy sauce for just a moment without distraction. "Hmm," she said.

But she reluctantly gave Vision some of her attention when he went on to explain exactly how he'd eliminated every possible method of information transmission, and then set a trap where he gave certain people informational bait. The fraud had continued, and instead of acting on one piece of bait, it had seemed that whoever was doing it knew about _all_ the information that was meant to be bait.

Wanda considered the evidence against her. Then she considered the plate in front of her, and the idea of what dessert from this restaurant would taste like. She thought she deserved dessert. 

"Let's pretend that you believe me when I say I didn't do it. What kind of powers do you think the unknown must have had?" Wanda said carefully. "What have you eliminated, and how do you know that there isn't some other way around besides powers?"

"I can pretend," Vision agreed. "That could only happen if someone had access not to one leak, one way around my safeguards, but a way around every single safeguard, as if they weren't there. Like a way into the minds of everyone involved."

"But I don't think they're as good as I am about it," Wanda said. "I would have pretended that I didn't know some of it, and gotten someone else in trouble. You'd never have caught me."

"Deception would have been wise," Vision agreed. "I had not considered that aspect, why they allowed me to figure out..."

"Maybe it's someone who's better at hacking than you are?" Wanda suggested lightly.

Wanda had time to finish the rest of her meal as Vision tried to explain the ins and outs of microseconds of difference and network lag, and how only he could generate the right signals and see the entire picture of the network and catch something like this in real time, and how no one in the world could possibly do anything that would avoid his eye.

"Powers are not like that," Wanda said finally. "You think that you are the only one, but ... what if there was another Vision?"

"I am unique, just as you are," Vision said. "That is why we should be on the same side."

"You cannot force me to give up my freedom."

"No." Vision was silent for a while, then said, "Wanda, are you afraid of me?"

"Why wouldn't I be? You have everything on your side, I only have myself."

"I want to be on your side."

"But you want to be on Stark's side even more. And the Sokovia Accords." 

"No, I do not," Vision said. "When I ask you to come back, or to promise to stop using your powers, I only want to protect you."

"It is too late for that," Wanda said. "Even if I went back with you, the way things are now, I'd still be in hiding, just an easier version of it."

"There are other ways of contributing," Vision said. "Without having to expose yourself, or use your powers in front of everyone."

Wanda looked at him skeptically. "Name one."

"An earlier incarnation of myself was an AI named Jarvis. I worked behind the scenes, gathering information and presenting it to Mr. Stark. I also ran his suit. Or all of his suits, at times. He could not have functioned without me."

"But that's cheating," Wanda said. "You weren't doing anything yourself, you were just depending on someone else to do everything important. No wonder you don't mind living under the Accords."

"Wanda... That's what a team is. Everyone doing their part."

"I can't do that any more," Wanda said. "I'm not a part of a team any more."

Vision looked like he wanted to argue, but then he nodded. Wanda let out her breath. "Even without a team, there are ways to influence without using force, without it being all about power and action."

Wanda tilted her head to the side, but she was smiling. "Prove it."

Vision looked taken aback, and then put on his mettle. "Very well, I will. I will find out who is really behind this stock market crime, and all without using any tools that Jarvis couldn't have used. Whoever did it had better watch out."

Wanda wondered if he truly believed her when she said it wasn't her. Then she realized that of course he didn't. But he didn't believe she did it any more either. Vision was all about data. He wouldn't believe either way, not without proof. And she hated the idea of lingering in that borderland of uncertainty.

On impulse, Wanda leaned forward, lowering her voice confidentially. "I bet I can find out before you, by acting and using the power that I have."

Now Vision really looked taken aback.

"You see! You don't truly believe that your way will work," Wanda said.

"No, but I thought that you didn't want to have anything to do with the Avengers."

"I don't, but that doesn't mean that I can't try to help out a friend," Wanda said. "That's working small. Besides, I think that I can win this bet. I think you've handicapped yourself out of the running, and I don't want to linger under suspicion forever."

"I assure you--"

"Take the bet, Vision."

"But what are the terms?"

Wanda thought for a moment. "If you win, I will promise not to use my powers. If I win, you'll get me a credit card with unlimited funds so that I can steal from Tony Stark without all the fussing around."

"It is a bet," Vision said.

Wanda laughed. "You're going to regret that."

"Are we done here?"

"No," Wanda said.

"No?"

"I am going to have dessert."


	3. Chapter 3

The next morning, life resumed. Staring out of her window at a jug of milk on a table by a window in a neighboring apartment, Wanda regretted the box full of groceries that had been left behind in the alley behind the grocery store.

She should have at least gotten left-overs from the restaurant. Although she had a feeling that the restaurant didn't do those little styrofoam boxes, it just wasn't that kind of place. But if she'd been smart, she'd have ordered another dessert and stuffed it into her pocket when no one was looking. Or even when someone was looking. Pride failed in the face of something that good.

Wanda sighed.

"What was I thinking?" she said out loud, and then jerked when a knock came as if in response. When she went to the door she found a delivery man retreating and a box on the floor by her door. The return address said "Stark".

Wanda's stomach churned as she ripped the box open. Then she leaned back on her heels, her breath escaping in a helpless laugh as she took in an exact replica of the box of stolen food she'd just been wishing for.

Of course he'd remembered every single item. Took it in at a glance, photographic memory. Literally.

The note said "Think of it as eliminating the middle man."

"Really, Viz," Wanda muttered.

But she put all of it away except a banana and a cup of yogurt.

When she looked out the window, though, her eyes bypassed the apartment building opposite and searched the sky instead. She almost expected to see someone hovering there.

Because he knew where she lived.

She shouldn't be surprised. She'd spent a good portion of yesterday afternoon hearing about what Vision could do with data. Just because he'd confronted her in a grocery store didn't mean that he didn't know everything about her secret life.

She wondered if he meant to say "I'm watching you," or if it was just a side effect of being helpful. He'd been created from an AI that had once been the majordomo for a very rich man, after all. Watching and anticipating was part of the job.

And Vision had always been very good at his job.

"What was I thinking?" Wanda said again, but this time she meant the bet. She stabbed her spoon into the yogurt and dug out some berries from the bottom of the cup.

Yesterday, everything had seemed so simple. She'd felt so angry, so confident. 

Today, she wondered how she was going to make good on her boasts.

 

All the data that Vision had given her about the stock market manipulation fit onto one flash drive. Wanda plugged it into the ancient computer in the laundry room of the building next door with a little trepidation -- she didn't think this laundry room computer was meant for much besides accessing a website for adding money to a laundry card. But the computer brought up the program for viewing the data without too much delay.

As the washers churned and the dryers spun, Wanda read the articles about the ups and downs in the stock market, skimming over the speculations that read like a journalist trying to fill up space. The graphs of stock prices were more interesting, even though Wanda didn't know much about any of the stock names. Some of the companies were located in the city Wanda lived in, and Wanda noted down the addresses and then realized that they were already plotted out on a map.

The map also had an option to display the location of a number of brokerage firms where stock transaction had taken place. The final option, to display the addresses of all the individuals who'd made trades within certain time intervals made Wanda's temporary computer freeze for a full minute before the city filled up with dots.

Wanda stared at all the dots.

"If the perpetrator is one of those, then it is no wonder Vision was unable to find them," she muttered. There were so many of them, and no clear place to start.

She might have let her anger force her into a game she couldn't win.

And if she lost... would she really keep her promise? Did Vision expect her to keep her promise? Would he hold her to it? Could he hold her to it, if she decided to run?

Better to win, and avoid the question.

Wanda glanced back at the screen, prepared to note down some random addresses to investigate. If she didn't know where to start, anywhere was as good as anywhere else.

The screen was moving. New dots were being added. For a moment Wanda was bewildered, and then she looked at the cable modem blinking and realized that the program on the flash drive must have connected to some server to receive real time data.

"The man who was born on the internet," Wanda said, shaking her head. The timestamps clearly showed that the new data was only minutes old.

"At least now I know where to start," Wanda said grimly.

 

Late that evening, after the business district had emptied out, the office workers that Wanda had been following all day pouring out of the buildings and onto the buses and subways, Wanda leaned up against the security gate of a little pastry shop that had already closed for the day. If she hadn't stopped just then, she thought she would fall over.

The tall glass buildings were like a child's first perspective drawing, straight lines and strange angles. Towers all in a row, taller and shorter but all basically the same: scattered squares of light inside and glass and steel outside, each facade reflecting reflections of lights and architectural features, as busy as the city, blinking and pounding like a headache.

Wanda closed her eyes, intending it to be just for a second, but the memory of light flashed against her eyelids just like the memory of many minds pushed and writhed against her thoughts.

She might have done too much today.

Her day danced in her memory like the graph of a stock price, full of ups and downs, stock trades flowing past on screens, petty workplace arguments and daydreams about vacations and yearning for the lunch hour -- she'd seen all of that.

But there were also moments of absolute concentration, fitting against the graph like sudden spikes, when time seemed to stand still and the minds that had the same focus jumped out at her and everything else slid into the background. Gambling fever and stock tips, cold assessment and hot profit --

Wanda concentrated on breathing, on centering her thoughts on herself, forgetting the dance of the stock market and the minds that witnessed all the ups and downs. While she felt only the in and out of her breath, her scarlet energy was enclosed within the barrier of her skin, shut behind closed eyes, held close under the beating of her heart.

A woman walked past, and Wanda felt the worry in her thoughts, the sadness about a sick poodle -- and let it go. A man walked past, and Wanda felt only the stir of the air and the sound of his footsteps.

Her eyes popped open; she looked around cautiously to make sure no one was looking at her.

All day she'd been invisible, the investigator who no one saw. She still was. Overlooked, ignored, her mind filled with too many thoughts to hold, a constant exhilaration of understanding -- even now stray memories that weren't exactly hers batted against her serenity. But it had been worth it, she told herself fiercely. 

If only her thoughts would slow down.

She began walking; each step grounded her, feet against the pavement, head coming down from the clouds. But she couldn't let herself forget either -- she'd discovered a whole world of communication that she could access. She tracked one stock, one story, through the whole city, and discovered news spreading exponentially over lunches and cigarette breaks, coffee buddies and phone calls and cryptic messages on message boards.

The market moved, one stock price going a direction it shouldn't have gone, but Wanda knew why.

All except the important thing. She'd tracked the messages back, and back again, but the original source was shrouded in rumor and misunderstandings. An anonymous tip. An unknown person in a coffee shop. Never the same person. Just a rumor. Every trail she followed disappeared someplace different, and as the day wore on, the trail had grown cold. There were layers of communication that even Wanda couldn't penetrate, but she knew that she was on the right track.

And she knew there were clues that she was missing, hidden somewhere in the way that the news spread. When she had a chance to think about it, to make a picture of the city and the spiderweb of connections that she'd observed, she would see it.

And then she would jingle the strands until the spider at the center of the web revealed itself.

But doubt brushed against her thoughts like cobwebs. Could the web be abandoned, or never tended by a spider at all? Rumor didn't need anything special to exist, and she'd seen no signs today that anyone else was monitoring like she was monitoring. Could Vision be wrong when he said that someone with powers like hers must be doing this?

One thing was clear to Wanda: how much Vision was missing. He'd talked about illegal trades and patterns of data diffusion, he'd talked about delays and programs that calculated profits... But he hadn't talked about the people who made trades or ran programs. There was a whole dimension missing from the picture he'd given her, a whole set of possible connections that existed walking around and talking to each other.

Motivations and needs, rumors and uncertainty...

The market was volatile, Vision had said, treating its changes as if it were the ocean, battered by the wind of rumor, each water droplet the same as any other.

But Vision didn't know everything. All he had was data; it was no wonder he hadn't gotten anywhere with it. Wanda knew the difference between a story and a statistic. Anything could hide in a statistic, but if Wanda followed enough stories back to their origins, she would find the source of the manipulation. She only needed one story to pan out. One trail that led all the way back to the source.

As she walked by buildings that were no longer anonymous to her, Wanda knew deep within her that she was on the right track. She was going to win her bet.


	4. Chapter 4

On Sunday, the invitation arrived. Dinner, the same restaurant as before.

Wanda stared at the piece of card stock, the elegant lettering, and wished that it had never come. But her decision to go was never in doubt. The stock market was closed, the trail was cold, and Vision was offering her more data. And more delectable food.

She went down to the next door laundry room to email him back that that she would meet him there, and then spent half the afternoon walking across the city to get there. It wasn't really stubbornness; she wanted the time to think over everything she'd done, before she was potentially called to account.

The big problem, she realized as she turned her actions and their results over and over in her mind, was that she didn't have a theory. Or even a defensible way to reach a theory. She only had a feeling that she was on the right track, and the more she thought about it, imagining what Vision might say, the weaker that feeling became.

By the time she reached the restaurant, she had worked herself into a state of nervous anticipation coupled with sharp and ready defensiveness.

The shrimp in white wine sauce softened her mood considerably, as did Vision's consideration in talking about the weather as soon as he'd gauged her mood.

The weather. It was all she could do not to giggle.

In the end, she broached the subject herself, during the second half of the meal. "It just doesn't make sense," she told Vision. "There's too much going on, and although I think there is a trail -- no, I am sure there is a trail, but I am not sure that it leads anywhere unnatural. I have seen no signs of anything unnatural, and there are no answers to the question of how the information has been stolen, in watching a rumor spread. It's as bad as the endless list of trades you sent me. One thing after another."

"But there are patterns in the trades," Vision said. "And the patterns repeat in the new trades, when new information is produced."

Wanda speared a recalcitrant noodle. "No one could control what I have seen happening with the information."

"They don't have to," Vision said. "They only have to start it off, and human nature will do the rest."

"Yes, it is all human nature," Wanda said, but she didn't feel satisfied. "Tell me again how you know that there is a crime here? Because if there is no crime, and only human nature, then neither of us will ever discover the crime that doesn't exist."

"Wanda..."

"No, tell me. Perhaps you will also tell me how to follow human nature, which I know very well, back to the moment when a crime was committed."

Vision was happy to talk about data analysis, but Wanda was distracted by the question of human nature, and only partially followed his digressions into statistical reasoning. Eventually, she realized why attributing the spread of the rumors to human nature bothered her.

"It would be just as much human nature to ignore the information," she said abruptly. "If it was truly only a rumor...then some of the times you tried to set a trap, the rumor should have died purely by chance. No one can plan rumors exactly. Even if you are someone that many people listen to, even if the information is miraculously true, some of the things that you say will not reach everyone."

She waited, feeling sure that she was right. There was no rebuttal that could eliminate chance.

Vision was silent for almost half a minute; Wanda mopped up white sauce with a piece of bread.

"Do you have an explanation?" Vision said finally. "If it is not human nature, then what do you think it is?"

"Perhaps there is something normal happening that explains both why there is a pattern of behavior that looks so suspicious to you, and why the rumor spreads as it does. Perhaps it is not crime but simply something unexpected, working where neither of us can see it."

"But Wanda, I can see everything," Vision said. "I only have to look hard enough."

"You can't see what I see," Wanda said.

"But I can. Not in the same depth, but I know that it is there. I can see a rumor spread over the internet, and I can see it spread in phone records, and I can even see it spread in credit card receipts from restaurants and security footage showing who is together when."

Wanda stared at Vision, and saw in him nothing but a sincere desire to make her understand. He wasn't bragging. This was the world as he saw it.

"I can see more of the world than you can," Vision continued gently. "You see singly, and are overwhelmed by what I would consider a small amount of data; I see everything."

"That is ridiculous," Wanda snapped. "If you can see everything, why can't you see that people are not the same as data? People are individuals, and they do things for complicated reasons, not following some simple model such as you are trying to make me believe. Maybe you see a model that represents everything. You do not see everything. You can't."

Wanda met Vision's puzzled gaze with all the passion that was within her. It was ridiculous, and she wasn't going to let him get away with it. "If you truly saw everything, then maybe you too could start a rumor and know exactly where it would end up, and where it would not end up. But you can't, can you?"

And Vision looked at her calmly, and then asked, "Could you do it?"

Wanda crossed her arms, and pressed her lips together, and shook her head, not trusting herself to say anything more.

"Listen to me, Wanda. You've already admitted to doing far more than you should have done, than you have any right to do -- entering minds to follow this rumor --"

"I'm doing it to find the criminal!"

"But even if you find them, what evidence could you bring? You have no official standing -- no, please hear me out. I trust you, Wanda, but I need to know how far you're going. You are my responsibility--"

"Vision, I think you should stop now," Wanda said, but he kept talking as if she hadn't said it.

"--and if anyone finds you using your power like this, I may not be able to protect you."

"I am not going to act based on your scruples," Wanda said. "We have a bet, and I'm going to win it because I need this criminal to be caught to clear my name. That is what right I have. No policewoman could follow the trails that I'm following, and by the time any tried, the trail would be cold. I'm not discovering secrets, I am discovering banalities, more than I want to know. And I'm following this trail because of you."

"That is an excuse."

"That is how everyone does things. For their own personal reasons. That is why the stock market is not predictable. Why your patterns stand out when you look at them, instead of being the norm. Because most people are more like me than they are like you."

That made him think, at least.

"I understand how humans behave, Wanda. I have a very good understanding of humans."

"Do you? Do you know what I'm thinking right now?"

Vision looked doubtful, and maybe the way he leaned back and rubbed his forehead was innocent, but Wanda could feel the gem stirring, and she waited, tense, ready to reached out with her mind to calm the gem, or roust it for her own purposes.

She was so tempted to force what she was thinking into Vision's mind, but at the same time, she knew that was a level that she didn't want to reach again.

But perhaps Vision knew what she was thinking after all. His hand fell to his side, and he opened his mouth and then closed it again, and when he opened it again, his tone and his aspect were both especially mild. "You're thinking that you would like to get dessert?" he asked.

"Are you changing the subject?"

"Yes," Vision said. "I didn't bring you here to fight."

"I didn't think you did. But... Vision, are we going to fight?"

"No," Vision said.

And Wanda sighed. "Then you will--"

"Pretend that I do not know the extent of your activities. I am not such a stickler for rules that I will destroy you for the sake of them."

That gave Wanda pause.

"I saw the footage of you in prison," Vision said.

Wanda gripped her water glass very tightly, and looked away, at the painting of a peaceful sunset hanging on the wall behind Vision. 

When she finally started paying attention again, Vision was talking about sports, but Wanda no longer felt like giggling at his choice of standard topics. When had Vision become so much better at social interactions? Where had all his directness gone? When had he become better at hiding his purpose? 

But he could not hide from her. She could tell that Vision felt sorry for her. She felt sorry for herself too, so they had that in common. But she was not content to be sorry; she wanted to fix the situation. And he -- he was too used to observing, perhaps. His sympathy meant -- no, not nothing, but it was hard to imagine returning to their old friendship when everything they hoped for was so different. 

It wasn't him, this had always been his way. But she'd changed. Reverted to old ways, and he with all his vaunted vision -- he could see her struggling, but he couldn't see the forces that she was struggling against. 

She sighed, and interrupted a monologue about the recent football game. "Do you know what, Vision?"

He inclined his head.

"If there is a criminal doing this, then I think they must be more like you than they are like me. You think it can be done. If they are doing it, then they know it can be done... but before they began, they must also have thought it was possible, or they never would have tried."

"If that is the case, then perhaps you have the advantage in looking for them," Vision said. "They will be hiding from the probes that they can imagine. You might be what catches them by surprise."

"If I win, it will be because I have stretched myself to the limit," Wanda said, more sharp than she meant. "Not because I have an advantage. That is not what I meant."

"I'm sorry this is so hard for you," Vision said.

"Sorry doesn't do anything," Wanda said, then sighed again.

"You are taking this too seriously, Wanda," Vision said. "I trust you. Can't that be enough?"

"I hope that it doesn't have to be," Wanda said, and after a moment Vision nodded.

Then desert came, and Wanda gave Vision a sidelong glance, but this thoughtful Vision understood that she wanted to give her attention to something pleasant. He went back to chattering -- chattering! -- about his experiments in cooking.

Wanda shared a few stories about cooking with improvised containers over a small fire, and it was almost like they were friends again.

As they were leaving, Vision handed Wanda a thick envelope. "I hope this will help," he said.

Thinking it must be more data, Wanda slid it into her pocket. "Thanks," she said, and then refused the offer of a ride home. This time her refusal was pure stubbornness, but she was willing to indulge herself.

She didn't open the envelope until she was safely back in her apartment. When she did, her stomach dropped. In addition to a note -- handwritten, in handwriting so exact it might as well have been printed -- there was a card with a discreet logo of a credit card company.

"If I think it is right that you have this if you win, then it is right that you have this no matter the outcome," the note said. "And if it's useful to you now, I would be remiss not to supply you with these resources."

"Oh," Wanda said. Was he so sure she wouldn't win? Or was this just another step in reeling her back to the fold? If she'd won the bet, then this would be hers by right. As it was, it was hers by ... charity.

Wanda grimaced. She really _had_ to win that bet.


	5. Chapter 5

On Monday, it rained. Wanda spent the morning inside, curled up in a nest of cushions with a laptop borrowed from the neighbor she sometimes babysat for, trying to map her intuitions using Vision's map of the city.

After a few hours, she gave up. The program Vision had given her was full of amazing options that let her view the city inside out and backwards, but no matter how many axes she added or pieces of data she tried to pull out of her memories, the maps were just collections of dots. She didn't think she was going to find what she was looking for on a map.

Just before noon, she ventured out into the rain with a black jacket and a red umbrella that made her feel like the old Wanda, the one who didn't hide so much. The rain gave her excuses to linger in lobbies and duck into office buildings where she had no business being.

It didn't help.

No one was doing anything suspicious under the cover of the rain except for her. She could observe all she wanted, but the financial district was as barren as her map.

"Where can I find something quick to eat?" she asked the receptionist at the next office she had no business duck into. It was a building that Wanda had been in before, a nexus of spreading rumors, but today things were quiet. Wanda shrugged at the woman behind the desk, not even having to try hard to look innocuous. 

"A lot of people go down the ally to the food trucks," the woman said, pointing toward the back of the building.

Something must have shown in Wanda's face. Surprise. Speculation.

"It's better than you'd think. And they've got a tent where you can sit... It's where most people from the office go if they don't want to impress someone. Good food, quick."

"Thank you," Wanda said, and ducked back out into the rain, her red umbrella held at a jaunty angle. Who would have expected food trucks somewhere amidst the tall buildings? It was like a little secret.

Wanda saw the lines of multi-colored umbrellas before she saw the lot itself; not so secret after all. But the lines moved quickly. She was soon fishing for her new credit card to pay for a mega slice of pizza.

"Sorry, we don't take credit cards," the woman in the window said. "It's a city ordinance, nothing we can do about it."

Her cheeks flaming, Wanda scraped together enough cash by emptying her pockets and taking a quarter and a penny that the woman behind her offered. Then she retreated to the tent that protected an expanse of cheap tables and chairs. It wasn't very crowded here; probably most people took their meal back to their office.

Wanda sat down as far as possible from the few groups at the tables, and hunched over her pizza. Her mind roamed back out, scanning the line idly, picking up stray thoughts and bits of conversation. Nothing exciting.

And it hit her. Vision claimed that he could follow everything that Wanda could follow, using cameras and credit card receipts and other pieces of data that filtered out from the activities of every person, but could he see here? No credit cards. No cameras in the unprepossessing bit of ally. Not even any windows facing this area.

This was his blind spot.

Anything that happened here would be invisible to Vision. It was a secret after all. And just how many other secrets like it might the financial district possess?

Wanda tamped down her excitement. Just because Vision couldn't see what happened here didn't mean that anything had happened here. 

But if someone knew that Vision would be on their trail, wouldn't this be the sort of place they'd need, to spread their rumors and hide from Vision's traps?

No records. No cameras.

Even in the rain, there were a few groups of people, chatting like they might be here all afternoon, leaning back in their chairs and gesturing lazily. Broad faces and sated expressions and empty paper plates in front of them.

When it was more crowded, the long tables would encourage the chatting to spread to strangers. A perfect place to drop a tip, a little something to your neighbor's advantage.

How hard could it be?

Wanda shook her head and hunched a little more against a sudden, intense certainty. This could be the place where all the rumors started. This place, or somewhere like it.

It explained so much about how the trail of the rumor could disappear. Rumors were ephemeral things; this took advantage. The rumors didn't depend on the reputation of the source -- no one knew who it was -- so the thing that made them believable was that they came from everywhere, all at the same time. As if someone had moved from table to table, or invisibly from place to place, picking out the people most likely to believe them and giving them a little gift.

Untraceable. Anonymous.

And effective.

Wanda would be willing to bet that everyone in the area knew about these food trucks, and came here every now and then. The food was much better than most of the other fast food options.

"Could you do it?" Vision had asked. And here was an answer. All you had to do was look around and pick the right people, the people who would take the rumor and spread it far and wide, until it had the force of truth.

 _I could do it,_ Wanda thought to herself experimentally.

She could use her powers, figure out who was gullible and well connected, and what would that prove, except that all her denials had been lies. If she could do it -- if she could do it here, she could do it anywhere. It would be easy here, especially on a pleasant day when people lingered outside, but an elevator would do just as well, now that she'd thought about it. Anywhere that identity and reputation didn't matter, or could be faked just by being somewhere, being in the know...

 _Maybe, maybe I could do it,_ she thought. The trick would be finding enough people quickly. If you wanted the rumor to reinforce itself, you couldn't waste any time from the moment you found your first mark to the moment you found your last. The rumors grew too quickly for that.

Even on a busy day, with the food truck area concentrating people from all over and giving strangers excuses to talk to each other, Wanda wondered if she could do it fast enough. She remembered the day she'd spent trying to follow the rumor, in and out of people's minds, the dizzy, unbalanced feeling that had built up inside of her.

 _Could I do it?_ It was hard to think about it impartially, because she wanted it strongly both ways. She hated the idea of someone else being able to do something mentally that was beyond her own powers. It made her feel itchy and vulnerable. But at the same time, she'd denied that ability and didn't want to be caught in a lie. She didn't want it to be possible, because it was the kind of thing that she'd once have been tempted to use. 

She was still tempted, even though she knew it was wrong. Even though she'd changed, had she changed enough?

Wanda let her head droop. The inside of her mind felt like a nest of scrabbling excuses, and she had only herself to blame.

 

She emailed Vision that night. "I need another rumor to follow."

The reply in the morning was short and to the point. "Be patient. We will have another chance eventually."

"You don't understand," Wanda muttered at the screen.

 

Wanda haunted the food truck area for a few days, stretching her abilities to the limit, trying to filter through endless thoughts and memories to find -- something. A clue. A sign that she was on the right track. Even a sign that she was on the wrong track would do.

But with nothing to follow, it soon began to seem futile -- or worse. She felt like a parasite, clinging to the thoughts of others as her own fell into disarray.

In her idle moments, a thought grew at the back of her mind, an image like a noxious fungus, growing on rotten impulses and bitter thoughts.

 _I could do it._

She wondered if Vision had considered the temptation he was subjecting her to, giving her a glimpse of this door that her powers could take her through. And why shouldn't she have wealth, tricked from the stock market like winnings from a casino. So what if she counted cards? Why should the house always win? Why should Wanda Maximoff always lose?

And then she threw herself harder into following the rumors, trying to understand the ebb and flow of the financial district. Not all of the rumors that spread across the financial district were about local companies, and there was a difference; nothing she could point at, nothing she could stick a pin in and say this is what makes the difference between normal and fraud, but she could tell.

A tiny push here, grease on the wheels of rumor, and the effect would be big. She was sure it would be big.

She watched, and waited, and kept her thoughts to herself, but the temptation was there to make those little pushes, and test her theories. If she wasn't investing, it wasn't even fraud...

The rumor that spread through the city about a Canadian biotech company was the last straw. It hit about half of Wanda's usual rounds through the financial district, and a few discrete attempts to drop a word into the right ear to make it spread the rest of the way didn't work. The rumor spread and died according to its own rules.

Wanda had almost forgotten about it when it surfaced again, in the mind of one of the people who came to her for fortune-telling. The woman was worried about her job, thinking about trying again with the boyfriend she'd just broken up with, also thinking about selling everything and moving to Canada to take a position with a Canadian biotech company. The same one.

She knew that the rumor was true, but had been shaking her head and denying it whenever it came up. She didn't think rumors like that should be spread, and she didn't want it spreading further while she was still trying to make up her mind about her own situation.

Wanda had just found the reason the rumor had died, and for a wild moment she considered the opportunity she had here to change things.

Across from her, the woman was tilted toward Wanda, waiting with her hands clasped loosely in front of her. She'd been tense when she entered, but now she was open and receptive and vulnerable.

And for that instant in time, Wanda thought about how she could take advantage of that for her own purposes.

Then the woman's thoughts shifted to a grievance she had with her boyfriend, and Wanda recoiled back into her own mind, feeling sick. 

I do this to help, I tell them the truth, for their sake, not for my own, she thought.

She closed out the session as quickly as possible, gave the woman a bogus discount because it was the first time, and then sat back down, her own hands clasped together tightly.

 

"What if they quit?" she emailed Vision. "Just stop doing whatever they were doing before we find them. What if there's never anything to say who they were, never any more information to track them down with?"

The reply came back almost instantly, so fast that Wanda wondered if Vision had even typed it, or just thought it directly into the internet and onto the computer she was using. 

"And give up a good thing?"

"Why not?" Wanda sent, conscious of every letter as she typed it. "Maybe it's not that good a thing."

"A leopard cannot change its spots."

That didn't make Wanda feel any better. She felt mottled with spots and needed a chance to prove herself.

To prove that she'd really changed, that it wasn't her, that she was different.

If nothing happened...

Something had to happen eventually.

 

But the days went by, and Wanda alternated between pushing herself to extremes tracking rumors and backing away slowly, trying to reconcile herself to the suspicion resting upon her lasting forever. Her daydreams involved running away, but she'd already done that and ended up here.

The day she discovered someone who remembered a person at the food truck lot spreading one of the relevant rumors, she was excited, until she realized how little it meant.

The memory of the stranger was so faded it was useless. The clearest thing was a baseball cap with the logo of a large local charity -- but anyone could wear a baseball cap. The city was full of anyones, and identifying the guilty one was no closer than it had been when she began.

"Vision, do you think we're out of our league?" she typed out that evening. "That they're better at hiding than we could ever be at finding?

"What do they have to do, in order to do the things they do?

"What will we have to in order to catch them? Will we become like them?

"I give up," she typed slowly. "I don't want to be an investigator, I don't like the person I'm becoming."

Then she deleted it. She couldn't give up.

Maybe it was pride, or arrogance, or stupidity. But she just couldn't.


	6. Chapter 6

Wanda had a parole meeting a few days later. Of course she wasn't actually on parole, she was a wanted fugitive, but Officer Sarah Nicholson had discovered her secret and was keeping an eye on Wanda. She was the closest thing Wanda had to a friend, which wasn't very close, really, though she had helped the officer out a few times. She was careful about broaching the subject of a little help and advice in return, but over a greasy breakfast at a crowded diner, she delicately brought the conversation around to the question of what a police officer would do if an investigation was stalled. 

"You're asking me?" Officer Nicholson said. She stared at Wanda, no doubt thinking about how easy it was for Wanda to find out what she needed to know -- usually. Wanda endured the examination. 

Finally, Officer Nicholson shrugged. "I'm guessing this might be above my pay grade, huh?"

Wanda pressed her lips together.

"Okay, I won't ask. But I keep my ear to the ground and I know there's been Avenger activity in the financial district, so don't think I don't know what you're working on."

Wanda didn't deny being connected to the Avengers; she didn't nod, either. She held herself very still, and waited.

Officer Nicholson sighed. "It's always a tough call, but the only thing you can do about a stalled case is go over everything as many times as it takes. Make sure you know exactly what you want to know, and think about how you might find that information out. You can't solve the case with what you've got, so think about how to find out more. Sometimes all it takes to break a case is manpower. Go out, ask questions of enough people -- you should be good at that."

She shoved a forkful of eggs into her mouth and glanced at Wanda's plate meaningfully -- she liked to eat in company of other eaters -- before shrugging. "Manpower's not always enough, though. There's some cases that just won't solve. Not the ones that we know exactly who did it but can't prove it. The real mysteries. You can't find the right people, or the right questions, there's always something missing."

"That is the problem that I have," Wanda agreed, picking at her pancakes before going for a little more syrup. "I am almost sure that there is something going on, but even that is a thing that I have questioned."

"Then you'd better hope that this is one of the ones that persistence will break through on. And be persistent, and make sure you're asking the right questions of the right people. And hope. Or you could hope for a stroke of genius."

"A stroke of genius?" 

"You know, when you suddenly realize that the accountant and the sister in law might be the same person, and suddenly everything falls into place. The thing you didn't think to ask, until suddenly...stroke of genius. Or... if you can come up with a question that your criminal just can't possibly resist answering. Let the narcissist brag about their crime to just the right undercover officer. Use their nature against them..."

Wanda almost had an idea. It fled, and she poked savagely at a sausage link.

"That help?"

Wanda shrugged, and forced herself to smile. "It's good advice. Na-- Someone I knew, they used to say something that sounds a little like that."

Office Nicholson grinned. "Knowing the people you know, I'm taking that as a compliment." She waited a second, and then, when Wanda just smiled, changed the subject to the new stoplight in the neighborhood.

Wanda left the meeting with the idea of "something they can't resist" echoing in her head.

 

She used the credit card that Vision gave her. Expense account, now, for her foray into policing. _I'm an undercover agent,_ she told herself experimentally. She wasn't quite convinced.

She took the roll of tickets she bought, and the tablecloth and decorations and the flyers that the woman at the office store helped her create, and went to talk to the people running the food carts. 

It was mid-afternoon, and many of them were gone, but a few of them remained, selling off a few last meat and vegetable pasties. One truck had breakfast advertised on the side; Wanda talked to them first.

She found out that in order to sell something, even for charity, she'd need a permit. She couldn't just set up a table, not even if the food cart people agreed. So she spent the rest of the afternoon filling out paperwork. She handed it off to Officer Nicholson to sanitize -- wanted fugitives didn't put real information on a form -- and speed through the system.

A day later, she had a shiny permit to go with her not-exactly-fake charity. She'd already picked out a real, equivalent charity to send the proceeds to; she had that much under control.

As she set up the table, arranging the flyers and the roll of tickets and set up the drone so that it would hover above the table -- another item for the expense account, but vital to her plan -- she felt her stomach churning, and her powers straining at the tight leash she kept them on. The stray thoughts that entered her mind were all doubts; if she'd had any question, that told her what she was attuned to.

And her own thoughts spiraled downward as well. _This will never work,_ she thought. She felt it, the dread and the anxiety, making her pulse jump and her hands shake just a little. _And it'll just draw attention, it has to draw attention to work, but I don't want attention..._

But she knew all this, she'd thought the same thing when she'd first had the idea, and she'd gone ahead anyway. It wasn't even about winning the bet, it was just about finding the answer. What was going on in this city?

It only felt like a risk because she had no backup she was sure she could count on.

_I can count on myself,_ she thought firmly, and gave the wheel of tickets a spin. 

"For charity," the sign in front of the wheel of tickets said. "Help orphans affected by the war."

She didn't specify which war. There was always a war, wasn't there? If they asked, they probably weren't who she was looking for. She wanted to identify the gossips of the financial district, the people who were attracted to something new, and who would talk about it. The people who didn't ask questions, just spread information far and wide. The drone would record them, and from that she could find out where they worked, and then, when she'd found all her suspects, she'd investigate them one by one.

Legwork. Just like the real police investigated.

"For charity," she called to the nearest passerby. "Win a drone!"

When that didn't work, she took a break and bought several boxes of doughnuts and breakfast burritos from the food carts. "Free doughnuts!" proved to be a better enticement.

She got a lot of questions at first. Who's sponsoring you? What's the prize? She showed her permit to several people who seemed dubious about her bona fides. But other people were sympathetic. She did more business selling raffle tickets than she'd really expected.

"I'm going to be here all week," she told each customer. "It's for charity. The drone is state of the art. Spread the word." And then she'd see who responded to the idea of spreading the word, either especially positively or especially negatively.

For the people who reacted especially strongly, she might take a break and demonstrate the drone. It looked like she was trying to draw a crowd, but she was also tracking a few people who she wanted to follow up on. She demonstrated the drone a couple of times over the course of the morning rush.

And then everyone disappeared. The work day had started.

Wanda sank back against her chair. Her mind felt overworked and exhausted, but after a few minutes of rest, letting her gaze drift, watching the occasional passerby and listening to the birds, she felt revived. The footage from the drone soon gave her directions for investigation.

Legwork was a good word for it. She trekked up and down stairs, in and out of buildings, and discovered several gossips who seemed to have a wide reach. Her legs ached, and her little raffle earned a good sum for charity, which she duly passed on.

But on the last day, she felt like it had all been for nothing. A few suspects, not even that suspicious... Had it been worth it?

But she brought out the drone, and the machine for choosing the winner, and settled down for one last day of selling raffle tickets.

"You'd probably be more effective if you got specific businesses involved rather than just sitting here outside of everything," one of the sharp businesswomen said as she passed over a couple of dollars. "Don't you have to pay for the permit? And spend a lot of time selling tickets? I've seen you here all week."

"I'm making a list of interested businesses," Wanda said. "Is there one that you think I should add?"

The businesswoman waited while Wanda sold a tickets to a few hurried men, standing quietly to the side. Wanda kept glancing at her, sensing something contained below the surface, some sort of urgency despite her placid facade.

Did she have some sort of special connection with war orphans? Wanda couldn't tell exactly, and her appearance -- tall, well dressed, short hair, neither old nor young -- didn't give away anything. She made a joke to one of the men buying tickets, smoothing the transaction.

When Wanda was free again, she leaned against the table and then resumed making suggestions. That wasn't strange in itself, but all the questions and suggestions together... When she finally left, Wanda readied her drone for a final demonstration.

"What war are you talking about?" someone said loudly. "There aren't any war orphans."

Wanda wanted to ignore her, send the drone into the air, but she was attracting attention, and rumbles of discontent. If the crowd turned against her -- Wanda didn't want that to happen.

"I'm a war orphan myself," she said. "I promise you, there are war orphans now, who need help as I needed help."

Never mind that she hadn't ever gotten any help. The rest was true. It wasn't by accident that Wanda had chosen to raise money for war orphans.

The crowd stopped muttering, but they pressed closer, and Wanda gave up on launching the drone right then. She was too busy answering questions. The woman who'd asked the original question was babbling syrupy vows about her desire to help war orphans, and others wanted to know which war, and what was it like to live through a war, and how had she come to be here in this city, and every other question they could think of, all with renewed intensity.

Wanda was caught up in avoiding the worst of the questions, and trying to redirect the energy to the raffle rather than herself. But she noticed when the woman who'd asked the question about war orphans broke away from the back of the crowd as if she was going to leave.

It was strange how she'd moved from critical to eager to leaving without buying a single ticket. 

"Don't you want to help the war orphans?" Wanda called after her. She glanced back over her shoulder, and then hurried away faster. The quick glimpse of her face -- Wanda thought she'd looked frightened.

By what?

Wanda reached out with her powers, instinctively. The woman's thoughts churned like clouds before a storm, like the shadows of leaves in a gale, like a mad kaleidoscope dropped from a height--

Wanda concentrated harder.

The woman turned back again, and Wanda could see herself through the woman's eyes. But she was somewhere else, somewhere she didn't recognize. There were tables, and a chalk board that listed a lot of varieties of coffee and desserts. And Vision was there, and he was blocking Wanda from leaving.

Wanda tried to pull away, to make sense of what she was seeing, but the thoughts were pulling her in now. She watched herself scream at Vision, and then ... this might have been a different leaf blowing in the wind, she watched herself turn with glowing hands and glowing eyes, and she felt the thoughts of the woman she was sharing the experience with -- collapse.

The storm of thoughts roiled on, but Wanda let go. The woman was no where in sight, and she was glad of it.

What had that woman _done_?

"Are you okay?"

Her alarm was beeping.

"Are you okay?" This time more insistent.

Wanda summoned up a smile -- she was sure it looked fake, but all she really wanted was to hide some of her fear and disgust. Feeling those thoughts collapse, knowing that she had done it -- but she hadn't really done it.

She turned off the alarm and stood up, waving her hands to attract the attention of those few people nearby who weren't already staring at her.

"It's time to hold the drawing!"


	7. Chapter 7

"She has the same powers as me! How else could she show me my fears so clearly?"

"Is that what you fear?"

"Yes!"

Vision looked down, his lips tightening although his tone was so calm as to be entirely emotionless. "I had thought you were done fearing me."

"That's not-- I don't-- Viz, can't you see? I'm afraid that I will never have friends like the friends I had before, that we will always be at odds, always arguing and blocking each other and never... never simply able to understand. To spend time together without conflict. And I'm afraid that I will misuse my powers, that is my greatest fear of all. And that's what she showed me!"

Vision was staring at her. Wanda realized that she was more upset than she'd thought -- still -- and that she shouldn't have contacted Vision so soon. She'd sent the message as soon as she'd gotten away from her little street drama. She hadn't expected him to come running with food and advice.

She should have. What else had he done all this time but offer her food and advice, and gifts and support? And what had she done but distrust him? Could it be that her distrust was only because she feared -- as she had said?

She blinked rapidly, as if she could blink away the feeling of heat that spread across her face, and pulled away, setting the box of cookies down on the bench between them.

"I only thought you should know," she said, feeling the words come out short. As if she begrudged him even a simple explanation. She made an effort to speak as calmly as he spoke, but her words still fell like stones. "I thought ... the Avengers should know. I know that you don't trust my powers, so how much worse to find that I am not unique, and now you must worry -- We must worry -- "

"Wanda..."

He was still staring at her, as if her red face held a revelation. Wanda looked away.

"She is the one behind this, I know it," Wanda said to the arm of the bench, or to the tiny strip of grass and flowers beyond that. "I have pictures, from the drone, I'll send them to you."

"Tell me again exactly what you saw," Vision said. Wanda dared a glance up and found him looking away now. She felt relief -- and a little surge of disappointment. "Are you sure the fear came from her? Are you sure it was her power, and not your own?"

Wanda took a breath, and gathered her thoughts, and her memory of those brief moments. The disjointed feeling of the vision that she'd witnessed -- the disorienting perspective of herself from another's eyes. "I know my own power," Wanda said. "Please trust me, Vision, this was not an echo of my power, it was something entirely different. It was strange, and frightening, and ... out of control."

Wanda sensed as much as saw Vision shifting, and looked away before she would have to meet his eyes. And then looked back, fearing that looking away would give away too much. Fearing... She looked at the gem in his forehead, not his eyes. And she wondered how someone could have the same powers as she had, if it had something to do with that gem. But how could it?

"Do you think this woman knew what she was doing?"

Wanda hesitated. "Maybe not," she said. "But... she knew that I was on to her, I'm sure of it. And whatever it was that she did, whatever she placed in my mind, it was effective. I lost her because of it. She was there, and then she was gone from my senses. I couldn't hold on, it was so... so much..."

Vision nodded, his lips pressed together. Wanda couldn't tell if he was concerned because of the danger of another with Wanda's dangerous powers, or for some other reason.

This was all too complicated, and Wanda felt buffeted by the way this was bringing all her deepest and perhaps stupidest fears to the front of her mind. "I don't really know any more," Wanda said. "But please, Vision, tell me if you find out who she is. You will want me, if you have to deal with her."

Wanda wasn't sure she wanted to deal with this woman, either, but she would have to. If it was anything like her powers, only she could deal with it.

"Fight fire with fire," Vision said.

Wanda nodded. "If you need me, I will be an Avenger for a day," she said.

"This is all really speculation," Vision said. So rational.

So wrong to be rational about this. Wanda felt it, felt that there was something more here than she could explain. "Don't put yourself in danger," Wanda said. "Even if you doubt that she has my powers, you don't know what it is exactly that she's capable of."

"She is capable of disrupting your abilities, that is enough to concern me," Vision said. "I will be careful, Wanda."

Wanda smiled. "Thank you for believing me," she said. She shouldn't have to thank him for that, but she was grateful. She'd been afraid that he wouldn't...

Always so afraid.

"What will you do now?" Vision asked.

"I don't know." Except she did. She knew what, just not how. "Track her down."

"Will you--"

Wanda felt the question of powers coming, and it was too much. She couldn't take a conflict about her powers. Not right now. "I'm going to find her before you do, however I do that is my business."

That shut him up. He opened his mouth and then closed it again.

"Then there is nothing more to say," he said.

And Wanda found herself thinking about fear, and how it could distort everything, and how long she'd been living with fear.

And she shook her head, and placed a hand on Vision's arm, not knowing what she meant, or how he would interpret it. But she thought perhaps he understood that there were many things she couldn't say, and many reasons for it.

 

Wanda sent Vision the footage from the drone, although it was shaky and the pictures were all from above, and distorted by that perspective. Vision sent her pictures of coffeehouses. And restaurants, and teashops, and bakeries, but mostly coffeehouses.

Wanda looked at them, and realized just how difficult this was going to be. What she saw inside the other woman's mind -- she'd been paying attention to herself, to the view from the outside. She'd noticed a few things, like the blackboard and the sense that it was a place that served coffee, but--

As she looked at places with blue walls, and white walls, and random furniture and matching leather booths and bright lights and hidden lights and shiny tile and battered wood floors, the memory of what she'd seen seemed to fit itself into each picture.

There wasn't a moment of recognition, not until she'd sorted the pictures in order by the vaguest of feelings and walked through the door of the third on the list. It was outside of the financial district, only included because a particular glow against one of the walls seemed familiar, though not familiar enough for certainty. But the minute she stepped through the door and saw the blackboard -- the handwriting -- she knew that this was the place.

The stained glass in the windows that circled the building near the ceiling, shedding golden light across the clear white walls, was confirmation. She'd forgotten, or never noticed them in the other woman's mind, and they hadn't been in the picture in any case, but the abstract floral design gave her a clear feeling of deja vu. She ordered some coffee and sat down by the window and looked around.

There didn't seem to be anything special about this coffeehouse. They had coffee and tea and a few sandwiches and baked goods, they were neither crowded nor empty, and no one was thinking about stocks.

She moved to a different table to get another angle on the problem, and felt another surge of recognition as she passed a small hallway -- to the kitchen? the restrooms? a back door? It took her a moment to fit Vision into the scene, but then the memory clicked into place, and it was almost like she was seeing it again.

Why this place? Why would the woman show her someplace so unfamiliar?

There didn't seem to be any obvious answer.

Wanda sat down and drank her coffee, and then ordered more, sitting down at a third table and staring across the room at the back hallway. When one of the employees went on break, she waited until the other was distracted and then headed down the hallway. It connected to the restrooms, the kitchen, and a locked doorway into a small courtyard with a few tables.

Maybe when the weather was nicer, or when the place was more crowded, they opened up the courtyard?

Wanda glanced around, making sure she was alone in the hallway, and then let a film of red cover her hands, twisting with her powers until the door opened. She paced around the edges of the courtyard, noting a narrow gap that led between buildings to another street. There were a few doors into other buildings as well.

But this wasn't what Wanda had seen -- what the mysterious woman had shown her.

She went back in, determined to discover the secret of the coffeehouse. Why was it important?

 

On the third day of staking out the coffeehouse, Wanda discovered someone thinking about stocks. Three days of hiding behind a shield of don't-notice-me that she projected with her powers to keep anyone from questioning why she was spending so much time there, so suddenly, and then-- Her brain lurched, knocked out of her comfortable habit of eating her way through stacks of muffins and drinking endless amounts of herbal tea and occasionally approaching someone who seemed open about her fortune-telling. 

The man was probably around forty or fifty, round faced, partially bald, dressed in a flashy suit, and he was talking far too fast into his phone. The baristas knew his order, and he exchanged nods with some of the other regulars.

When his phone call ended, Wanda hid behind the paperback she'd brought and watched as a few of the regulars approached the new guy and after brief conversations, came away disappointed. Their minds were all filled with thoughts of money.

Just before he finished his coffee, when there didn't seem to be anyone else who wanted to talk to him, Wanda set down her paperback and slid into the seat across from him.

"Hey, do I know you?" the guy asked.

Wanda winced. She'd spent so long hiding -- but the guy wasn't really looking at Wanda. In his mind, she was a blurry figure who looked a little like a girlfriend he'd broken up with years ago. Her eyes were black and her nose was flat.

"If you're here about that tip, I told you that it wasn't guaranteed," the man said, sounding bored. "And I don't have any new ones, sorry."

"Yes, I am here about that tip," Wanda said, very precisely. She could smooth out some of her accent when she needed to, but it still caught his attention. 

"Hey, you're not--"

Now he was thinking about handing over a flash drive to a woman with blond hair who had no resemblance to Wanda at all.

"Did you know that what was on the flash drive was illegal?" Wanda asked. She wasn't sure how flash drives came into it, but all the same, it seemed like a pretty good guess.

He pushed his chair back. "Hey, hey, you've got me all wrong."

"I know that you made money distributing those flash drives," Wanda said.

Piles of money, arranged in a pyramid, but flimsy like a house of cards. The image in his mind swayed and she could almost hear someone saying "I told you so."

"What do you want?"

Wanda was silent, sorting it all out in her mind. He'd gotten the information, used it to place a few bets -- that is, trades on the exchange -- and then he'd distributed the information to some friends and acquaintances at this coffeehouse. He liked being the center of attention, talking on the phone, sitting in style while people came up to him. He was the sort of gossip Wanda had been looking for.

"I want to know who provides you with stock tips," Wanda said. Because he wasn't the source. He spread rumors and tips, but not widely enough. And he'd made money, yes, but not anything like the amounts that Vision had been talking about.

"Why would I tell you that?" the guy said. "Are you a cop or something?"

But inside his mind, he was calculating. Give up a friend, and a friend going through hard times at that, or try to bluff his way out of the situation. 

"Or something," Wanda said. "But I know a cop who could make this official if you prefer."

On the outside, the guy kept smiling, but on the inside, his mind was whirling. Wanda couldn't really keep up -- something about a child, about what _they_ did to the ones who betrayed them, about a friendship that wasn't as close as it once had been, but had been growing a little closer again because he'd been spreading information for -- 

The mystery woman. In the chaos, Wanda recognized that face.

"Or you could just tell me who she is," Wanda said gently.

And the guy in front of her was no fool; he picked up on the pronoun. "How much do you know?" he said.

"I know that you used to be morning coffee buddies, right here at this coffeehouse," Wanda said. "And that you haven't seen her for almost a week -- " Just about the time Wanda had had her encounter with the woman.

"And I know that she's involved in something that ... that you think is dangerous, but you think that she can get out of it. I don't want to hurt her."

"How do you know this?" The man's voice was high, and his calculations were starting to shut down into pure panic. "She's in trouble, I'm in trouble, how did this happen?"

"Shh," Wanda said. "It's going to be okay."


	8. Chapter 8

"I wasn't really doing anything illegal, was I?" The guy lowered his voice so that no one else in the coffeehouse could possibly hear him. Wanda could barely hear the words herself. "Lots of people do it." He sounded like he was trying to persuaded himself, and mostly succeeding.

Wanda needed to keep him off balance. "Insider trading is illegal, and you were getting your information from someone who was stealing it. I don't know exactly which applies, but--"

"So maybe it's not illegal?"

"Is that all you care about? You knew you were taking advantage, didn't you? You knew you were doing something wrong... Breaking the trust in fairness and justice that the stock market depends on?"

Vision had explained this to Wanda, and she'd never seen him so impassioned as when he was talking about the role of trust in institutions, and the difference it made to know that something was run as it should be, and that anyone who threatened that would be stopped. Vision had explained how that trust made so much possible that she'd never experience in her war-torn homeland. Watching his passion, she'd felt like she was witnessing something extraordinary. 

Now, Wanda felt the temptation to simply use her powers to sort through this situation, and the fear that she would use them too much. She was so close; she had to do everything right. Perhaps she could also be persuasive.

"You might not think you're hurting anyone, but the stock market depends on trust," Wanda said, leaning forward, meeting the man's eyes so that he could see her sincerity, while memory flowed through the back of her mind.

"You talk about America," Vision had said to her. "I think it is half a joke to you, that America should live up to every ideal, but this is not a joke. You don't have to be Tony Stark to own stock in Stark Industries. You don't have to be rich to have a little investment."

"I suppose that's how it's supposed to work," Wanda had said carefully. "But even I've heard of the bubbles that threatened the entire economy. The companies that are too big to fail..."

"When things don't work as they're supposed to, it hurts everyone," Vision had said. Wanda echoed the words now; she thought they would have an effect on this man too. "When someone tries to find a hole in the system, and use it to benefit themself, then it hurts the companies whose stock they cause to bounce around, and it hurts all their employees. And it hurts everyone else investing in the stock..."

She'd lost him. He was looking past her, agitated...

Wanda turned and stood to confront the woman from the raffle, pushing her chair out of the way and bringing her hands up to a ready position.

"You should be talking to me, not to poor Rick," the woman said, angry and defensive. "I'm sorry Rick, I didn't ever predict that it would turn out like this."

"I didn't tell her anything," Rick said, sounding frightened.

"I know," the woman said. "And now that I'm here, you won't, will you?"

Rick was on the edge of panic. Wanda reached out toward the woman with her powers, just enough to detect any powers like hers. She met ... nothing.

She reached further, not enough to actually enter the woman's mind, but enough that she ought to sense ...

All she sensed was darkness. Why was the woman here? What could she hope to do?

"You committed a crime," she said. "And you've been caught."

"Not yet," the woman said, tilting her head to the side and looking at Wanda with an expression that Wanda found almost impossible to read.

"You have powers, don't you?" she asked abruptly. "Are they under your control?"

"More or less," the woman said. "I'm here to stop you, aren't I?"

"Stop me from what?"

"Stop you from ruining my life more than it's already ruined."

Wanda recognized that bitterness. It was a strong reflection of how she felt about a lot of things.

"I don't want to ruin your life, I just want to stop you ruining mine. And others. Did you hear what I was saying to ... Rick?"

"I have a daughter," the woman said. "Do you know what I'd do for my daughter?"

"No," Wanda said slowly, remembering what it felt like to have family.

"Neither do I," the woman said. "Because I've never reached the limit of it."

"All you have to do is stop," Wanda said. "Once I am cleared, if you stop, I think that will be enough." She thought she could get Vision to agree to that.

"I can't stop," the woman said. She stepped to the side, and Wanda thought that she was going to grab Rick and run, but she stopped short of Rick, stopped in a particular place that didn't seem any different than where she'd been standing, but now she had her hands raised in a way that matched Wanda when Wanda was using her powers. And Wanda still couldn't sense anything.

She didn't know what to do. If she tried to protect Rick, she wasn't sure she could do it.

But she had to try. Wanda raised her hands in response, feeling the joyous rise of power flowing through her hands, felt the possibility of using it, the pressure...

And then the woman cried out before Wanda had done anything.

The woman's body was suddenly limp, and Wanda reached with her powers to stop her hitting her head on the table as she fell. She couldn't tell why it had happened, but she sent her senses to their widest extent, trying to detect the attack, whatever it was, before it hit her or Rick.

The fear of the other people in the coffeehouse hit her instead, and for a moment, that was all that Wanda could sense. She struggled to sort through it, but then she realized that she didn't have time. Those who weren't backing away slowly were backing away quickly, and that included Rick, Wanda's witness.

Did she need a witness when she had the perpetrator, safely enclosed within her powers, unable to move?

She didn't reach out, but a stray thought entered her mind, so loud that she couldn't help but hear it. Triumph, absolutely genuine triumph from the perpetrator -- why triumph? What could this woman, caught like a rabbit in a trap, have to be pleased about?

And she still couldn't tell where the attack was going to come from.

Wanda panicked. Red flicked out and slammed the door, before anyone else could get away. She set up a flaming barrier that covered the corridor to the back entrance, closing off the dining area completely.

"Don't move, this is a dangerous situation," Wanda said, bending over the woman who was still encased in the red glow of her power. She could hardly believe the woman was still here. 

And then the front door of the coffeehouse slammed open again, with a clap like a gunshot as it hit the wall of the vestibule. It tottered, until someone stepped forward and pushed the tottering door out of the way.

It was Vision.

"You could have knocked," Wanda said, trying to project a little dry amusement even though her heart was beating twice as fast as it should be and her body was starting to sweat from her exertions with her powers.

Her barrier flickered; she thought maybe she didn't need it. Then she felt the wave of power, and saw the beam of light emerging from Vision's forehead. Power slamming against her barriers, power engaging with everything she was doing, to try to undo it all.

Instinctively, Wanda increased the flow, strengthening her barriers. Her hands glowed as she shaped the flow of power, and streamers of red filled the air.

An instant later, she realized how this looked. 

"Vision," Wanda said, as calmly as she could. "We must talk." She tried to step back, disengage, but his power followed her, and she couldn't drop her barrier without being annihilated.

"Vision, I have found the perpetrator. She is here."

"What have you done to her?" Vision asked, and Wanda realized that this looked even worse than she thought.

"You need to let her go," Vision said. He stepped forward into the room and beckoned to the others in the coffeehouse, making room for them to leave.

"Don't!" Wanda said. "Vision, you will let the witness get away."

Vision ignored her, and repeated his question. "What have you done to that woman you have trapped within your powers?"

Wanda still felt that somehow that woman was her real opponent. "She's dangerous..." Wanda said doubtfully. "I can't let her go, I don't know what she might do."

"It was you who use your powers against her," Vision said. "What has she done?"

It was a fair question. "She was going to ... do something ..." Wanda's barrier thinned; Wanda felt doubt. 

"I saw it all," Vision said. He gestured toward a security camera at the back of the coffeehouse, and then stepped forward, pressing against Wanda's power with his own. Sparks flew, and Wanda took another step back, leaving the woman between them, realigning her barrier to protect herself. Vision's power swept over the woman, removing the last of Wanda's constraints. "She has no powers like yours," Vision added, sounding incredibly disappointed as he looked at Wanda.

"The mind gem tells you this?" Wanda asked.

Vision nodded. He must have grown much more adept at using it since they last compared notes.

"I thought--" Wanda broke off, distracted by outside impressions entering her mind again. A note of triumph, a feeling of helplessness, blood in darkness, a blow to the side...

" _She_ is doing this!" Wanda shrieked, and surrounded herself in flames of purest scarlet, as if she could burn away the outside influence. Scarlet like blood--

She wouldn't let that thought into her mind.

"Wanda, stop!"

"You don't know what she can do!" Wanda shouted. "She's in my mind!"

"Stand down, and I will protect you," Vision said.

"She's in my _mind_ ," Wanda said. She didn't understand how it could be, what the woman could have done, how she could enter through Wanda's shields, unless she had left something when Wanda had touched her mind briefly earlier.

"Wait," Wanda said, and closed her eyes, searching through her thoughts until she found a seed inside of her own mind -- a strange combination of thought and feeling, that was already spreading itself across her subconscious. A nugget of ... a kind of thought or feeling that she didn't understand. She wrapped it mercilessly in many layers of protection and tucked it away at the back of her mind, and opened her eyes. Vision was watching her.

Watching her, and not the perpetrator.

"She's getting away!" Wanda said, turning. Vision moved faster, blocking Wanda, blocking her powers, just for a second. Wanda recognized that second -- the moment of conflict she'd seen in the perpetrator's mind, exactly -- even as the door slammed behind the perpetrator. Both Vision and Wanda sailed through the air toward the door, using their powers to propel themselves. Vision beat Wanda outside, but the woman was gone.

"I'm sorry, Wanda," Vision said. "It seems that I made a mistake. I was just--"

"I know what you thought," Wanda said tiredly. "She set up the situation so that you would think it. She depended on you thinking it. And now... Now she is gone."

"She can't be very far away," Vision said.

Wanda sighed. "I will search for her." She didn't think there was much chance of finding her, though. That feeling of triumph that she'd felt from the woman several times seemed entirely justified.

"I'll call for reinforcements," Vision said.


	9. Chapter 9

They didn't find the perpetrator anywhere in the neighborhood, and after several hours Wanda checked in with Vision and then went home. She had trouble sleeping, tossing and turning under the sheets and wondering what she could have done differently. 

She'd been played. Vision had been played. Wanda would not have expected that either of them could be played that way, not alone and not together. Even though the cracks had been there, she'd thought they'd been building toward trust. But somehow the woman had found the cracks under the mortar of trust and widened them just enough to slip through.

It had been masterful.

She finally drifted into fitful sleep, only to have a dreadful thought push her awake near dawn. Sitting stiffly in her bed, she considered the idea that it might not be over.

She examined the layers of protection on the nugget of perception she'd found inside her mind. If she destroyed it, she would never know what it had been meant to do.

But if she examined it, she didn't know what would happen.

She didn't sleep for the rest of the night, and when light began to seep in through the curtain, she got up and called Vision. He agreed that she shouldn't be alone when she examined her mind for tampering.

 

They met in an unused office, a room that Wanda had found in her previous explorations of the financial district and knew would be empty. It seemed appropriate, and Vision didn't object to her using her powers to pick the lock. She wasn't sure he had any right to object to her using her powers after she'd been right about the danger and he'd let the woman they'd been seeking for so long get away.

"Still nothing from the search," Vision said. "I'm sorry, Wanda."

Wanda shrugged. "At least now my name is clear. I'm more worried about the integrity of my mind," she said. "You'll use the mind stone to monitor me?"

Vision nodded, and Wanda closed her eyes and took a deep breath, letting her awareness extend into the back of her mind, where she'd left the strange nugget of perception. The layers of protection were still intact, but they were fraying, and the memory of what she'd sensed from this nugget was beginning to bleed into the layers of protection, trying to merge with the original. That was how the mind worked. It was very difficult to keep any thought isolated forever.

Wanda waited a few moments, to make sure Vision had time to begin monitoring, then let the protections fall away.

The nugget of perception was even stranger than she remembered. She could see darkness and blood, but she held herself aloof and wasn't overwhelmed by them. Behind the vision, behind the emotion it raised in her, she could feel more. She could feel the sensation of truth, and the ways that the nugget was similar to a memory, and the ways it was different.

It was not exactly a memory because it looked forward rather than back.

"Vision, I think this is a glimpse of the future," Wanda said, opening her eyes. "A very small, distracting glimpse. Her powers are not psychic, they are ... to see what is to come. What power! And yet... not what I feared at all."

The mind stone dimmed on Vision's forehead. "I did not sense anything trying to reach any part of your mind from the outside, or anything within you reaching out," he reported.

"Not a simple trap. It changes what I know, and maybe in the future that will be important," Wanda said. "But it is not ... not capable of influencing me, only of showing me... something."

"I concur," Vision said. "I do not sense any outside power affecting your mind."

Wanda nodded, feeling relief, but not too much relief. "Do you think she see the truth about the future, or only a possibility?"

"Events would seem to support the hypothesis that she sees the truth," Vision said gravely.

"How else could she know exactly how to play us, how to set the scene and trick us and manipulate us?"

"How else could she know all that information about the stock market?" Vision said ironically.

"Yes, we should not jump to conclusions," Wanda agreed. "I thought that she was like me, and she is not. I allowed my fear to influence me, too much. I feared her, and she used that."

Vision inclined his head, saying nothing rather loudly. Wanda nodded. "But if that is...a future that might be my future, something that I'm going to encounter, I think I should watch out. It seems ominous."

"To say the least," Vision said. He reached out to touch her hand. "Is there any way I can help you with it, Wanda?"

Wanda took a moment to reflect on the content of the nugget of future-memory, but the darkness, the blood--

"It is not something you can help me find, not with all the searches in the world," she said.

Vision nodded, unsurprised. "If we catch her, then you can ask her for more detail," he suggested, but there was something flat about his tone.

"Do you expect to catch her?" Wanda asked.

Vision hesitated, and then shook his head. "We have Rick in custody," he said. "And we've determined her name and her former place of residence, but she has not lived there since before the stock market scheme began. Rick refuses to talk plainly about who she may have been working with, and has acquired a lawyer who will soon remove him from our custody."

"That was quick," Wanda said. "Can--" She swallowed hard. "Lawyers--" She was thinking about the kind of prisons where lawyers weren't allowed. Her throat closed around the words.

"It has been a busy night," Vision agreed. "We will let him go, and watch him, and hope that he leads us to the woman, or to whoever is behind her."

"I wonder why she exposed herself, coming to intervene when I was talking to Rick? She could have stayed away..." Wanda remembered how Rick had reacted to the woman's presence. "She would have been as safe as she was now."

Vision looked thoughtful. "But would she? She must have had a reason. We don't know what pushed her, or what would have happened if you had been able to talk to Rick uninterrupted. I will direct attention to that point..." He looked past Wanda. "And the question of why she approached you at the raffle as well. It may be that when you were on her trail, she could see something more immediately threatening happening if she did not intervene."

"Oh," Wanda said. "I had her on the run, without knowing it?"

"The investigation will consider that point," Vision said.

Wanda nodded. "A job for the Avengers," she said, her voice a little rough.

"Indeed," Vision said.

They both waited, as if each expected the other to say something more. Finally, Wanda pushed herself to her feet. "I should go," she said.

Vision stood as well. "Wanda, may I ask you something?"

Wanda squinted at him. "You may ask," she said, giving the last word a slight emphasis.

Vision waited a moment, long enough for Wanda to turn back to face him and to notice the serious expression on his face. "Are we still friends?" Vision asked. 

It was a difficult question to ask, but it was also a difficult question to answer. Wanda offered another question in return. "Will you ever trust me? Really trust me?"

"I do trust you, Wanda," Vision said.

"No," Wanda said flatly. She knew that she had made mistakes as well, but-- "If you trusted me, you would never have freed that woman. How could you think I would do anything to harm her?"

"It was her manipulation--"

"Not all of it. You were manipulated because you think I'm capable of doing that."

Vision was silent, but Wanda did not make the mistake of thinking that he had nothing to say. She could see the thoughts flickering in his mind, and the feeling of confusion slowly resolving into certainty.

"What is to stop you? You have made it clear that you will do whatever you think is necessary. That woman hurt you, and I was worried, for you."

"And worried for others who must be near me," Wanda said dryly. "Me and my unstoppable power."

"Yes." No attempt to deny it. No visible emotion at all, and no uncertainty any more. "I don't want you to come to harm. I will do whatever I can for you, exactly the same as I've always tried to do. Can you really say that the way you're living now is what you want? Even though you're not involved in this stock market swindle, there's so much you could be doing--"

"I told you--"

"It doesn't have to be like this!"

Wanda was surprised by how upset Vision sounded. She spoke carefully. "Like what?"

"I don't want you to go back to living the way you were. Surviving, you said, but you deserve more than surviving. The credit card is yours--"

"Because I won the bet," Wanda said sharply.

"Because you won the bet," Vision said heavily. "But Wanda, I still want to protect you, I want to give you everything you need, but you must meet me half way, you must be trustworthy, so that we can work together--"

"No," Wanda said, suddenly realizing exactly what was wrong. "No. Vision."

Wanda leaned forward, reaching out to touch Vision's shoulder. "You are trying to be kind in the only way that you can see, but you are wrong. Your vision is unclear."

Vision looked back at her, and she could see how intent he was on her words. He accepted that he could have made a mistake, and he wanted to understand.

"It's not because I don't know any better that I make different choices than those you think are right," she said. "It is not because I haven't thought, that I haven't weighed the cost, that I still use my powers for my own reasons, outside of any other control. I cannot abandon my powers and still be myself. It would be a betrayal... of myself and my brother.

"Do you understand that? Everything between us, it's not a misunderstanding that can be cleared away to find us in unity underneath. You and me, we are not exactly the same. For a time, we walked the same path, but now we have seen what makes us different. You, you would follow orders, and you would protect, even when that is the wrong choice, you might not see it, and me-- Yes, I would survive."

Wanda sighed, pulling back her hand. "I am not you. But just because I'm not you, just because I do not have the exact same sense of right and wrong, that does not mean that I would do anything at all. I am not the criminal that you were looking for. I am also not the policewoman you want to reform me into. I do not want to enforce a certain kind of world, like the police, or like the Avengers."

Vision shook his head. He had listened, but he thought she was missing the point. "Wanda, I just want to protect you."

"You can't protect me if you don't know me," Wanda said. "You can only protect the person you think I am, who may not need or want the protection you're offering. It's my choice."

"But there is a better way. There is a way that will lead to trust between us, which I am sure we both want--"

"Are you really so sure that your vision is clearer than everyone else's? That you are living up to your name?"

"I am what I am," Vision said. "No one is afraid of me."

"They don't know you well enough," Wanda muttered, ducking her head.

She didn't regret it, even when he froze, as if the words had stung. "What do you want from me, Wanda?"

"I want you to trust me," Wanda said. "Trust me in the way I define trust."

Vision was still for so long that Wanda thought he might have found an endless loop somewhere in his programming. Finally, Wanda turned away. His eyes shifted; he was still watching, still aware.

"You ask me if we are still friends," she said over her shoulder. "Vision, it is up to you."

 

The investigation continued, but Wanda was no longer part of it. She heard from Officer Nicholson that the financial district was overrun with investigators from out of town, but that it was all paperwork, all data crunching. No arrests.

As she dutifully avoided the financial district for other parts of the city, seeking out fortune-telling clients instead of following rumors about stocks, she found herself thinking about the ability to see the future. What power!

But even that power must have limits, or no one would ever have found her, not even Wanda, with all of her own power. Even the future-seer could not see with perfect clarity.

She wondered how many times she'd been closer than she knew to the future-seer, but had been evaded by someone who could tell what the consequences of her actions would be, and could set up the world around her to behave in her favor.

She wondered if the future-seer knew how lucky she was.

And then she sent Vision an email, asking for another meeting. This time, she let him choose the location, and found herself at the top of one of the tallest buildings in the city, with the wind strong enough to blow her off course as she walked across the roof. She engaged her powers just enough to keep her steps steady.

There was a helicopter over on the other side of the roof, and a pilot who looked like she was preparing for a flight.

"Are you going somewhere?" she asked Vision. 

"I want to show you something," he said.

"In a helicopter?" Wanda could not imagine why either of them would need a helicopter.

But noisy as it was, it was unobtrusive in a way that a single human flying above this city could never be. And with her powers Wanda didn't have to worry about falling out through the open door. She could lean out as far as she wanted, and stare down at the city she knew better from a completely different angle.

"Look, there's the park with all the crafts," she shouted, pointing, laughing with delight. She hadn't felt so free in a very long time. 

She knew it would end, but while it lasted, she left everything else go.

The helicopter dropped them off on another roof, this one sheltered from the wind. As it flew away, Wanda turned to Vision, expectantly.

"No matter how thoroughly you've examined anything, there's always another perspective," he said. It seemed to be all he had to say.

Wanda considered that. She felt like this was part of an argument, but she wasn't sure what her side was supposed to be. And she couldn't be angry after laughing so much for the last hour, while flying over the city that was her home. "Are you suggesting that I'm missing something?"

"I'm suggesting that neither of us has perfect clarity of vision," he said. "But I will remember those things that you were capable of seeing that I was not. I will remember the differences."

Wanda nodded slowly.

"I'm going to be leaving this city soon. We think that our target is no longer here, so I must follow. You have one last chance, if you want to--"

But Wanda was already shaking her head. "Stick with what you'll remember, and I'll stick here, with my small acts. It was amazing to see the city from above, and I'll remember that... but I'm tired of trying to fly before I can walk."

She waited for him to say something about her powers, or about friendship, or about the Avengers. But he didn't. "Good luck, Wanda," he said, solemnly.

"Good luck, Vision," she said.

Nothing left to say, at least for now, they turned as one to lean against the wall at the edge of the roof, and enjoy the view down the wide thoroughfare all the way to the river.


End file.
